EDITIONS

Follow us

Employees work in Facebook's "War Room," where employees fight misinformation on the platform. Facebook said last month that it pulled down hundreds of U.S.-based pages and accounts that posted "sensational political content." | Noah Berger/AFP/Getty Images

Experts warn the social media threat this election is homegrown

Watchdog groups and online researchers will be on alert Tuesday for any signs of people using social media to try to upend the midterm elections — and their biggest worry isn’t the Russians.

Instead, homegrown American trolls are a growing force behind efforts on Facebook and Twitter to suppress turnout, confuse or anger voters, or otherwise spread fake rumors that could tip tight races or shake faith in the results. In many cases, the people are adopting the same tactics that Russian operatives used in 2016 to disrupt the U.S. presidential election.

Advertisement

Researchers already see Americans amplifying divisive social media hashtags aimed at the midterms — such as “#nomenmidterms,” urging liberal men to stay home from the polls so that women will decide the outcome. But a bigger worry is that more targeted disruption or suppression efforts will appear on Election Day, such as posts that mislead about polling place closing times or discourage people from voting via fake pictures of people being bused into the wrong district. The perpetrators, say experts, range from bored pranksters to partisans executing dirty tricks.

“It can be teenagers messing around, trolls on 4Chan doing it for the lulz, part of a sophisticated campaign, or a mixture of all of them,” said Ben Nimmo, an information defense fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Scattered examples of that syndrome have already shown up in past elections: In November 2016, ads on Twitter told Hillary Clinton supporters to “avoid the line” and vote by text message (which isn’t possible), and fake rumors flourished online late last year about busloads of non-Alabama residents voting in the special Senate election between Democrat Doug Jones and Republican Roy Moore. But the hoaxes could grow even more pernicious, researchers say — and could be hard to debunk, given many people’s growing distrust in traditional news outlets.

On Friday, Twitter said it had removed a “series” of bot accounts in recent weeks aimed at discouraging voting in the midterms, after complaints by the Democratic Party. The accounts, the company said, appeared to be domestic and were quickly taken down.

Experts worry that in the heat of the election and amid hundreds of millions of daily social media posts, malicious messages may live long enough to do serious damage.

“Let’s say someone puts up a tweet that says ‘The polling place is closed because the school is flooded,’” said David Brody, senior fellow for privacy and technology at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “That could be factual. Or that could be false information, designed to keep people in that precinct from going to the polls. And it’s really difficult sometimes to vet that in real time.”

“On Election Day, if misinformation stays up for even a short time, if it goes viral, can really have suppressive effects,” he added.

The warnings come as details emerge about increasing American election interference on social media, inspired by Russian tactics. Facebook said last month that it pulled down hundreds of U.S.-based pages and accounts that posted what the company called “sensational political content,” saying they violated rules against spam, fake accounts and coordinated behavior. The deleted content included sources on both sides of the political spectrum, such as Right Wing News and left-leaning Reverb Press.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters at the time that Americans are posting most of the U.S.-focused election meddling content that appears on the social network these days.

“It makes sense when you think about it,” he said. “In order to run an information operation, the most important thing is that you understand the culture.”

Social media researchers say the dispersed nature of the midterm contests, with hundreds of races spread across the country, makes for particularly fertile ground for Americans who can pair their knowledge of local landscapes with Russian techniques for spreading divisive and inflammatory messages.

“It’s much easier to understand what’s happening —and influence what goes on — if you’re in Texas as opposed to St. Petersburg or Tehran,” said Nimmo.

But while Facebook and Twitter, under pressure to police their platforms, have announced take-downs of more Russian and Iranian accounts, Americans’ use of social media to wreak election havoc is a much thornier issue for the companies.

While U.S. law and norms restrict foreign activity during elections, removing domestic content exposes the companies to charges that they’re censoring American speech — something they’re eager to avoid in the already tense political atmosphere around the tech industry in Washington. Republicans frequently accuse the internet giants of discriminating against conservative views.

The tug of war over access to the ballot box has been featured heavily this election season, the latest chapter in a long-running partisan fight over the sanctity of the vote in the United States.

In the Georgia governor’s race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, for example, Abrams and others have accused Kemp — who as secretary of state is Georgia’s top election official — of attempting to disenfranchise minority voters, including by removing them from registration lists. (Kemp has called that characterization “absolutely not true,” saying some of the removals were the result of poorly completed voter registration forms.)

And President Donald Trump — who has long complained, without evidence, of massive voter fraud — issued a tweet three weeks before Election Day declaring that anyone engaging in such activity will be subject to “maximum penalties.” Warned Trump: “Cheat at your own peril.“

Election watchdogs say the country isn’t well prepared to separate true and false claims.

“We’re still in ‘Combating Misinformation Online 1.0’,” said Stephen Spaulding, chief of strategy and external affairs at Common Cause, an advocacy group that works on voting issues. “2016 was a real wake-up call, and it’s a little disheartening we still haven’t figured this out.”

The experts, however, agree that in these last days before Americans decide control of Washington, their focus is on bad behavior coming from inside the U.S.

“It would be very convenient to blame all of this on Russia,” said Ben Scott, director of policy and advocacy at the Omidyar Network. “But it’s quite clear that the vast majority of disinformation is a domestic phenomenon.”